Reverse difficulty in tradeskills

If I would design a tradeskill system for a MMORPG, it would be easy to get recipes, there would be some gathering mini-game to get the resources, and then there would be a puzzle-type mini-game for the assembly of the item. So recipe easy, resources medium difficulty, and the challenge in the assembly.

Where I am a bit disappointed by the World of Warcraft tradeskill system is that the difficulty is exactly reversed to my ideal. The assembly of goods is trivial, you just click a button. The gathering of resources is of medium difficulty, as it should be, and I quite like the system there. But gaining recipes in WoW is the hard part, and totally annoying.

Only the basic recipes are gotten from the trainers. For other recipes you need to travel and then camp a vendor for a limited supply recipe spawning. Then there are lots of recipes which are random drops. Either one type of monster drops it, and you need to kill hundreds of them because of the low drop percentage. Or the recipe drops randomly from many different monsters of the same level range, for example the swiftness potion. You can only hope that somebody else finds that recipe and sells it to you, there is no chance to systematically search for such a random drop recipe if you want it. A third type of recipe is boss recipes, which drop from raid dragons, or boss mobs in high-level dungeons. If you are not a member of a powerful guild, you can forget about getting these recipes yourself, and the auction prices for these are usually astronomical. The last type of recipes is the most annoying, because these recipes are sold based on your reputation with some faction. And no, there is not one faction with all tailoring recipes, one faction with all alchemy recipes, and so on. Every faction has recipes for every tradeskill, and you need to grind faction for months until you can get the recipes from everywhere.

I don't think there is a single crafter in this game who has all the possible recipes of his chosen profession. Now that could be a viable concept if that would lead to different crafters making different items and trading them. But the most valuable items are "bind on pickup", thus only the person crafting them can use them. In spite of the high cost of the recipe for e.g. Truefaith Vestments, everybody who buys it makes exactly one vestment, and then never uses the recipe again.

Assembly being so easy, people tend to not value them at all. I witnessed a heated exchange on the trade chat recently, where one guy shouted "WTB Crusader enchantment, got the materials", and then got very angry when an enchanter tried to charge him 10 gold for the service. As the Crusader enchantment recipe costs around 400 gold, offering the service for 10 gold is quite reasonable. But the customer saw the only value in the materials, and wanted the service for free, because it only takes seconds to do the enchantment.

I played games with much better crafting systems. Smithing a blade in A Tale in the Desert is a very interesting and difficult game. You hit the blade in 3D with different hammers, which makes the metal move, and you try to get it as closely as possible to a given template. The closer you get, the better the blade. That would probably be too complicated for a mass public MMORPG. But even the simple puzzles of Puzzle Pirates for making items would be a big improvement. Because each different tradeskill has a different puzzle, while in WoW clicking the smithing button is the same as clicking the alchemy button. And the difficulty level of the same puzzle goes up for more difficult items. It would be great if the best blacksmith would be the guy who was best at something involving player skill. Right now the best blacksmith in WoW is probably somebody who is in a big guild and gets the recipes from his guild mates. Tradeskills should be an alternative to leveling and gathering equipment, but in World of Warcraft getting better in crafting works exactly like collecting gear: You raid and you grind.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:10 AM Permanent Link